Big data is literally everywhere. It’s in the cloud and under the cloud, at rest and on the move, and growing at a mind-boggling rate. IBM, a leader in big data analytics, has estimated that organizations create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day — and that 90 percent of the data in the world has been created in the last two years alone.

With the rise of big data, the state is pushing the bounds of the social contract. In the emerging system, moral codes, social norms, and human judgment are being augmented or replaced by hidden algorithms, placing a tremendous amount of power in the people and public and private institutions that oversee them.

I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.

Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.

As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought....

Cities and businesses can bid for a £10m government fund to revolutionise the way the Internet of Things benefits citizens.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Innovate UK are offering up to £10 million for a single collaborative research and development project to demonstrate the capability of IoT in a city region....

I'm a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, and 17 years ago, with my colleagues David Brock, Kevin Ashton and Sunny Siu, I helped launch the research effort that laid some of the groundwork for the Internet of Things. As you might imagine, my life is pretty connected.

A few years ago, before the Nest thermostat, a friend and I wired my house to make it easily controllable. Within a few months, we had dozens of switches, motion sensors and thermostats, all on a network running through wireless routers and the power lines within the house. I had a computer controlling lights and turning them on and off when we traveled, to make the house look occupied, and complex heating schedules in the winter that anticipated the habits of the family. The next step was going to be connecting my home to the Internet.

To conquer America’s quirkiest city, the company unleashed its biggest weapon.

Charlie Hales, the mayor of Portland, Ore., was running a zoning hearing last December when he missed a call on his cell from David Plouffe, the campaign mastermind behind Barack Obama’s ascent. Although Hales had never met him, Plouffe left a voice mail that had an air of charming familiarity, reminiscing about the 2008 rally when 75,000 Obama supporters thronged Portland’s waterfront. “Sure love your city,” Plouffe gushed. “I’m now working for Uber and would love to talk" ....

There is a certain allure to the idea that cities allow a person to both feel at home and like a stranger in the same place. That one can know the streets and shops, avenues and alleys, while also going days without being recognized. But as elites fill cities with “smart” technologies — turning them into platforms for the “Internet of Things” (IoT): sensors and computation embedded within physical objects that then connect, communicate, and/or transmit information with or between each other through the Internet — there is little escape from a seamless web of surveillance and power. This paper will outline a social theory of the “smart city” by developing our Deleuzian concept of the “spectrum of control.” We present two illustrative examples: biometric surveillance as a form of monitoring, and automated policing as a particularly brutal and exacting form of manipulation. We conclude by offering normative guidelines for governance of the pervasive surveillance and control mechanisms that constitute an emerging critical infrastructure of the “smart city.” ...

Data is the lifeblood of state government. It's the crucial commodity that's necessary to manage projects, avoid fraud, assess program performance, keep the books in balance and deliver services efficiently. But even as the trend toward greater reliance on data has accelerated over the past decades, the information itself has fallen dangerously short of the mark. Sometimes it doesn't exist at all. But worse than that, all too often it's just wrong. ...

We can think of the propositions the so-called “smart city” is built on as belonging to three orders of visibility. The first is populated by exotica like adaptive sunshades, fully-automated supply and removal chains, and personal rapid transit (“podcar”) systems. These systems feature prominently in the smart city’s advertising, promotional renderings and sales presentations. They may or may not ever come into being — complex and expensive, they very often wind up value-engineered out of the final execution, or at least notionally deferred to some later phase of development — but by announcing that the urban plan in question is decidedly oriented toward futurity, they serve a valuable marketing and public-relations function. Whether or not they ever amount to anything other than what the technology industry calls “vaporware,” they are certainly highly visible, and can therefore readily be held up to consideration.....

The century of ‘big data’ will be the century of unprecedented surveillance. The dream of tyrants down through history has been the total monitoring, control and management of the public, with the ability to predict…

Brazilian cities had unprecedented growth during the last decades, a phenomenon closely tied to the country’s booming economy. Large metropolitan centers such as state capitals Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo became the hubs for the most relevant companies in Brazil and the largest pockets of population, but also became affected by issues such as high crime rates, unreliable traffic flow and sudden rains that led to landslides and floods.

Over the last few years, these issues have been tackled by local governments through the use of technology, with smart city projects that placed Brazil at the forefront of urban planning in the world. ...

Italy's Internet of Things market is set to reach €1.55bn this year, with smart home products driving it forward.

"There are basically three fields which we see growing exponentially," Miragliotta said. "First of all, smart car applications: the GPS and GPRS boxes used by insurance companies to locate and keep track of vehicles' usage. There are currently almost 4.5 million connected cars on the road, or 12 percent of all cars out there."

Another sector with lots of potential, albeit one which currently represents only a small fraction of Internet of Things applications, is 'smart homes'. A survey of 1,000 homeowners found that 46 percent of respondents are willing to buy 'intelligent' products or services for their home in the near future. ...

With California thought to have only one year of water left, Silicon Valley data centres are trying to reduce their needs for cooling.

We hear a lot about what the tech giants are doing with our data, but what are they doing with our water?

Water keeps our internet-based economy afloat by ensuring equipment in data centres stays cool enough to funtion. Yet in California, the drought-ravaged epicenter of the technology industry, water is in ever-shorter supply. Nasa scientist Jay Famiglietti predicts the state has only one year of water left. This raises serious questions about the environmental impact of our burgeoning data demands. ...

My job is to protect the privacy and integrity of medical data for millions of people. However, as a human, I’ve made a very different choice: I have voluntarily given up my privacy. And here's why I think that's where the future lies.

ll we remember to design cities for people and life, enriched by interactions and supported by transport? Or will we put the driverless car and the app that hires it before the passenger? I'm worried that the current level of interest in self-driving cars as a Smart City initiative is a distraction from the transport and technology issues that really matter in cities. ....

National Geographic Channel features San Diego as the only U.S. city in its acclaimed documentary series "World's Smart Cities". San Diego was chosen for its strong technology sector, local innovators, green practices, smart public planning and an unparalleled quality of life. Other selection factors included San Diego's size of population, demographics/cultural diversity, livability, economy and business climate, education...

he nascent smart cities sector is to get its own trade association with the launch later this month of SmarterUK, a new body dedicated to promoting the emerging industry.

The body, which will incorporate the existing SmartGrid GB stakeholder group, will be chaired by former Conservative MP Dan Byles, who was recently appointed as vice president for corporate development at smart city software specialist Living PlanIT. ....

Architect and urban theorist William Mitchell, the former dean of MIT’s school of architecture and planning, had a phrase he liked to repeat that conveyed his idea about the new age of connectedness and digitization set to remake cities into more transparent, efficient and responsive organizations.

Over the past years European cities promoted lots of hackathons with the hope of fostering the development of city & civic apps. Hackathons have become a staple in cities’ policies with the ambition of promoting the development of a tech ecosystem.

However, very few startups graduated from this process and for the ones who did you can argue to what extend hackathons have been a decisive factor. Moreover, if we look at the apps that we have installed in our smartphones and we normally use, only very rarely we can find one resulting from this process. None is in the list of top 100 either.

Therefore, confronting results with the ambition it is hard to argue that we got far away with this strategy and it becomes pretty obvious that we have to rethink the whole process, because … it has not been working and it is not working. And in this case, it has not been that we didn’t try, we did and we did a lot. ...

Amid growing skepticism, an international gathering examines the useful benefits for an age of critical urban challenges.

The era of Big Data—of increasingly vast streams of information generated by people and their devices—is raising thorny questions for city planners.

To hear some boosters describe the benefits, you might suppose Big Data is about to unleash an unqualified urban renaissance. We've all heard the claims: Sensors will eliminate traffic jams and optimize energy demand. New mapping technologies will identify, and help to correct, urban problems no one could see before. Social media and crowdsourcing will target big and little problems, down to which potholes to fix—maybe even make governments work again.

As these claims have inevitably failed to live up to their hype, a pronounced backlash has set in. Big Data, and its cousin the Smart Cities movement, are both increasingly dismissed as fads and technology marketing schemes—and worse for some, examples of a too-reductionist science gone amok. The charges are worth considering....

A common language is being sought to help with the move towards efficient, smart, resilient and sustainable cities, with an initiative to clarify the words and terms used.

Called the ABC of Sustainable Cities, the international glossary is being put together by UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme) and FIDIC (the International Federation of Consulting Engineers) for the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris known as COP21. This is set for December 2015. ...

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